Overall I liked the article because I think the secretary analogy is closer than any of the industrial revolution comparisons that are more common, but you do make some really good points about the nature of the work and how conditions are different today.

In terms of lowering quality, I don't think this is anything new. Volume of code and depth of stacks has been growing pretty much in parallel with Moore's law, and this has degraded code quality. AI is accelerating this, and creating a new kind of slop since LLMs are sloppy in a different way than humans, but directionally I see it as part of the same trend.

However despite lowering quality, and increasing messiness, capabilities and user expectations have steadily increased. After a quarter century in this industry, I am blown away by the capabilities of modern computing, and the polish level of the best apps. The median bar for successful software is higher than its ever been. And to achieve this we've had to navigate steadily increasing complexity (much of it incidental), and that is where senior software folks shine.

So yeah, I think your observations are prescient and I agree with a lot of your, but I wouldn't characterize it as "nothing good ahead". I see it as a mixed bag, like all "progress", it just needs time to bake and get our arms around the impact. Currently the rate of change and hype is far out-pacing our ability to reason about it, perhaps that's the single biggest difference in the smart-phone, internet-enabled era of humanity.